Jenny looked sharply at Miss Ragstead to ascertain if she were laughing. The word sent such a pang through her. It was a favorite word of Maurice.
"I haven't got one," she coldly answered.
"No?" said Miss Ragstead, gently skeptical. "I can hardly believe that, you know, for you surely must be a most attractive girl."
"I did have one," said Jenny, surprised out of her reserve. "Only we just ended it all of a sudden."
"My dear," said Miss Ragstead softly, "I don't think you're a very happy little girl. I'm sure you're not. Won't you tell me about it?"
"There's nothing to tell. Men are rotters, that's all. If I thought I could pay them out by being a suffragette, I'd be a suffragette."
Jenny spoke with decision, pointing the avowal by flinging her cigarette into the grate.
"Yes, I know that's a reason with some. But I don't think that revenge is the best of reasons, somehow. I would rather you were convinced that the movement is right."
"If it annoys men, it must be right," Jenny argued. "Only I don't think it does. I think they just laugh."
"I see you're in a turbulent state of mind," Miss Ragstead observed. "And I'm glad in a way, because it proves that you have temperament and character. You ought to resent a wrong. Of course, I know you'll disagree with me when I tell you that you're too young to be permanently injured by any man--and, I think I might add, too proud."
"Yes, I am most shocking proud," Jenny admitted, looking down on the floor and, as it were, regarding her character incarnate before her.
"But it's just these problems of behavior under difficulties that our club wants to solve. I'd like to put you on the road to express yourself and your ambitions without the necessity of--say marriage for convenience. You're a dancer, aren't you?"
"Um, a ballet girl," said Jenny as usual, careful not to presume the false grandeur of an isolated stellar existence.
"I was once. When I began. Only they crush you at the Orient. Girls there hate to see you get on. I'm sick of it."
"I wonder," said Miss Ragstead half to herself; "I wonder if active work for the cause would give you a new zest for life. It might. You feel all upside down just now, don't you?"
"I feel as if nothing didn't matter. Not _any_thing," replied Jenny decidedly.